A typical enterprise computing environment includes multiple heterogeneous and distributed database systems supporting a variety of different enterprise organizations and business purposes. For example, many enterprises, such as businesses and the like, maintain different backend database systems to support customer billing, sales, accounting, marketing, inventory, ordering, repairs, procurement, etc. Further, many enterprises are the result of a merger of two or more predecessor organizations, each with their own set of heterogeneous and distributed database systems.
There are many reasons why multiple heterogeneous and distributed database systems may exist within an enterprise. Where database systems were created using different technologies or different data models, there may be considerable disruption to the enterprise, not to mention considerable time and expense, in migrating multiple database systems to a common technology platform. Moreover, migration of data may disrupt an enterprise's ability to provide meaningful and consistent information to customers while also maintaining the integrity of the data. For instance, a customer may be granted access to certain account data, but when the account data is migrated from one technology platform to another at the backend, the customer may no longer be able to access the account data as it existed before the migration. Such an occurrence may be inconvenient or even unacceptable to the customer. This and other concerns associated with data migration may delay or prevent an enterprise from migrating data. Thus, although migration of data may be desirable to an enterprise, certain concerns, including difficulties in maintaining data integrity and consistency of data presentation, for example, may prevent an enterprise from migrating data.